SAGE Open is an open access publication from SAGE. It publishes peer-reviewed, original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format. Articles may span the full spectrum of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities.

SAGE Open seeks to be the world’s premier open access outlet for academic research. As such, unlike traditional journals, SAGE Open does not limit content due to page budgets or thematic significance. Rather, SAGE Open evaluates the scientific and research methods of each article for validity and accepts articles solely on the basis of the research. This approach allows readers greater access and gives them the power to determine the significance of each article through SAGE Open’s interactive comments feature and article-level usage metrics. Likewise, by not restricting papers to a narrow discipline, SAGE Open facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers, whether within or between disciplines.

The article processing charge (APC) for this journal is currently 800 USD.

The APC is payable only if your article is accepted after peer review, before publication. The APC is subject to taxes where applicable. Tax-exempt status can be indicated by providing appropriate registration numbers when payment is requested. Please see further details here.

SAGE Open publishes peer-reviewed, original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format. Accepted articles span the full extent of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities.

SAGE Open seeks to be the world’s premier open access outlet for academic research. As such, unlike traditional journals, SAGE Open does not limit content due to page budgets or thematic significance. Rather, SAGE Open evaluates the scientific and research methods of each article for validity and accepts articles solely on the basis of the research. Likewise, by not restricting papers to a narrow discipline, SAGE Open facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers, whether within or between disciplines.

SAGE Open offers authors quick review and decision times; a speedy, continuous-publication format; and global distribution for their research via SAGE Journals Online. All articles are professionally copyedited and typeset to ensure quality.

Please read the guidelines below then visit the journal’s submission site https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sageopen to upload your manuscript. Please note that manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned.

Please also be sure to look over the submission checklist here before submitting.

SAGE Open will only consider up to five articles submitted by the same author at one time. Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of SAGE Open will be reviewed.

As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, that you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you.

An article processing charge (APC) of $800 USD will be payable on acceptance if the manuscript is accepted after peer review.

SAGE Open is an open access, peer-reviewed journal. Each article accepted by peer review is made freely available online immediately upon publication, is published under a Creative Commons license and will be hosted online in perpetuity. Publication costs of the journal are covered by the collection of article processing charges which are paid by the funder, institution or author of each manuscript upon acceptance. There is no charge for submitting a paper to the journal.

If, after peer review, your manuscript is accepted for publication, a one-time article processing charge (APC) is payable. This APC covers the cost of publication and ensures that your article will be freely available online in perpetuity under a Creative Commons license.

An article processing charge (APC) of $800 USD (plus tax where applicable) will be payable on acceptance if the manuscript is accepted after peer review. The APC is based on the date of original peer review submission, therefore all articles submitted before 1 July 2019 will remain eligible for the lower APC regardless of the article’s date of acceptance.

Before submitting your manuscript to SAGE Open, please ensure you have read the Aims & Scope.

3.2 Article types

SAGE Open welcomes the submission of original research articles and literature reviews.

3.3 Writing your paper

The SAGE Author Gateway has some general advice and on how to get published, plus links to further resources.

3.3.1 Making your article discoverable

When writing up your paper, think about how you can make it discoverable. The title,keywords and abstract are key to ensuring readers find your article through search engines such as Google. For information and guidance on how best to title your article, write your abstract and select your keywords, have a look at this page on the Gateway: How to Help Readers Find Your Article Online

The journal’s policy is to have manuscripts reviewed by two expert reviewers. SAGE Open utilizes a double-blind peer review process in which the reviewer and authors’ names and information are withheld from the other. In order to facilitate a blinded review process, we request that there not be any author identifying information within the main document of an "in progress" submission. Rather than removing citations, we recommend that authors change their names to "blinded" within the in-text citations and references section. Articles that are accepted for publication with blinded information will be corrected during the production stage of this process. The title page and author information also will be added before the article is published. All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible,while maintaining rigor. Reviewers make comments to the author and recommendations to the Article Editor who then make the final recommendation.

The approach of SAGE Open's peer review process differs from that of traditional journals. Rather than assessing the relative 'importance' of a given article to its respective field, peer review will instead focus solely on determining the quality of research methodology, that is, determining whether the research was conducted properly, the discussion accurately summarizes the research, and the conclusion follows logically from the research. Readers and the academic community at large will then have the power to continue the peer review process after online publication, helping to determine the significance of each article through the ability to share a discuss articles freely and through article-level usage metrics.

The Editor or members of the Editorial Board may occasionally submit their own manuscripts for possible publication in the journal. In these cases, the peer review process will be managed by alternative members of the Board and the submitting Editor / Board member will have no involvement in the decision-making process.

SAGE Open is committed to delivering high quality, fast peer-review for your paper, and as such has partnered with Publons. Publons is a third party service that seeks to track, verify and give credit for peer review. Reviewers for SAGE Open can opt in to Publons in order to claim their reviews or have them automatically verified and added to their reviewer profile. Reviewers claiming credit for their review will be associated with the relevant journal, but the article name, reviewer’s decision and the content of their review is not published on the site. For more information visit the Publons website.

4.2 Authorship

All parties who have made a substantive contribution to the article should be listed as authors. Principal authorship, authorship order, and other publication credits should be based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis.

Individuals who are not listed authors but who submit manuscripts on behalf of the authors (i.e. submitting third parties) must be listed in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript and in the accompanying cover letter. Authors must disclose this type of editorial assistance – including the individual’s name, company and level of input – and identify any entities that paid for this assistance. A statement must also be present confirming that the listed authors have authorized the submission of their manuscript via third party. Where appropriate, SAGE reserves the right to deny consideration to manuscripts submitted by a third party rather than by the authors themselves.

SAGE Open will only consider up to five articles submitted by the same author at one time.

SAGE reserves the right to reject articles that can be found for sale online.

4.3 Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, or a department chair who provided only general support.

4.4 Funding

SAGE Open requires all authors to acknowledge their funding in a consistent fashion under a separate heading. Please visit the Funding Acknowledgements page on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway to confirm the format of the acknowledgment text in the event of funding, or state that: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

4.5 Declaration of conflicting interests

SAGE Open encourages authors to include a declaration of any conflicting interests and recommends you review the good practice guidelines on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.

Please include any declaration in file separate from the main text, after any acknowledgements, under the heading 'Conflicts of Interest.' If no declaration is made the following will be printed under this heading in your article: ‘None declared’. Alternatively, you may wish to state that ‘The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest’.

When making a declaration the disclosure information must be specific and include any financial relationship that all authors of the article has with any sponsoring organization and the for profit interests the organization represents, and with any for-profit product discussed or implied in the text of the article.

Any commercial or financial involvements that might represent an appearance of a conflict of interest need to be additionally disclosed in the covering letter accompanying your article to assist the Editor in evaluating whether sufficient disclosure has been made within the Declaration of Conflicting Interests provided in the article.

For research articles, authors are also required to state in the methods section whether participants provided informed consent and whether the consent was written or verbal.

Information on informed consent to report individual cases or case series should be included in the manuscript text. A statement is required regarding whether written informed consent for patient information and images to be published was provided by the patient(s) or a legally authorized representative. Please do not submit the patient’s actual written informed consent with your article, as this in itself breaches the patient’s confidentiality. The Journal requests that you confirm to us, in writing, that you have obtained written informed consent but the written consent itself should be held by the authors/investigators themselves, for example in a patient’s hospital record. The confirmatory letter may be uploaded with your submission as a separate file.

At SAGE we are committed to facilitating openness, transparency and reproducibility of research. Where relevant, SAGE Open encourages authors to share their research data in a suitable public repository subject to ethical considerations and to include a data accessibility statement in their manuscript file. Authors should also follow data citation principles. For more information please visit the SAGE Author Gateway, which includes information about SAGE’s partnership with the data repository Figshare.

Through 2019 SAGE Open is running a trial with Code Ocean. Authors can upload the code associated to their published article so that readers can view and execute it. The platform, which is based on Docker, hosts the code and data in the necessary computational environment and allows users to re-run the analysis in the cloud and reproduce the results, bypassing the need to install the software. A link to the code, data, and computational environment will be included in the journal article enabling readers to seamlessly access and reproduce the code or rerun it against their own inputs. Please visit this page for more information and instructions for how to utilize this service for your article. If you wish to use this service, please upload your code as soon as possible after receiving an acceptance letter, to ensure the code can be linked to your article during the production process.

SAGE is committed to upholding the integrity of the academic record. We encourage authors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ International Standards for Authors and view the Publication Ethics page on the SAGE Author Gateway. Journal policy prohibits an author from submitting the same manuscript for consideration by another journal and does not allow publication of a manuscript that has been published in whole or in part by another journal.

5.1.1 Plagiarism

SAGE Open and SAGE take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked with duplication-checking software. Where an article, for example, is found to have plagiarized other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action.

5.1.2 Prior publication

If material has been previously published, it is not generally acceptable for publication in a SAGE journal. However, there are certain circumstances where previously published material can be considered for publication. Please refer to the guidance on the SAGE Author Gateway or if in doubt, contact the Editor at the address given below.

5.2 Contributor's publishing agreement

Before publication SAGE requires the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. SAGE Open publishes manuscripts under Creative Commons licenses. The standard license for the journal is Creative Commons by Attribution (CC BY), which allows others to re-use the work without permission as long as the work is properly referenced. For more information, you are advised to visit SAGE's OA licenses page.

Alternative license arrangements are available, for example, to meet particular funder mandates, made at the author’s request.

SAGE Open is hosted on SAGE Track, a web based online submission and peer review system powered by ScholarOne™ Manuscripts. Visit https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sageopen to login and submit your article online.

IMPORTANT: Please check whether you already have an account in the system before trying to create a new one. If you have reviewed or authored for the journal in the past year it is likely that you will have had an account created. For further guidance on submitting your manuscript online please visit ScholarOne Online Help.

7.2 Title, keywords and abstracts

Please supply a title, short title, an abstract and keywords to accompany your article. The title, keywords and abstract are key to ensuring readers find your article online through online search engines such as Google. Please refer to the information and guidance on how best to title your article, write your abstract and select your keywords by visiting the SAGE Journal Author Gateway for guidelines on How to Help Readers Find Your Article Online.

Please be sure to write your titles and abstracts with a global, interdisciplinary audience in mind.

Articles should not exceed 10,000 words (excluding references) and may present original research or literature reviews. The word count (which includes all text including the abstract, manuscript, notes, tables, figures, etc.) should appear on the title page.

Manuscripts should include an abstract of approximately 150 words, and, beneath the abstract, 4-5 keywords. When preparing your abstract, we suggest you describe the purpose of your research, the methods or approaches you used, your results, and your conclusions.

All manuscripts should follow the style guidelines set forth in the sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.

7.3 Information required for completing your submission

Provide full contact details for the corresponding author including email, mailing address and telephone numbers. Academic affiliations are required for all co-authors. These details should be presented separately to the main text of the article to facilitate anonymous peer review.

You will be asked to provide contact details and academic affiliations for all co-authors via the submission system and identify who is to be the corresponding author. These details must match what appears on your manuscript. At this stage please ensure you have included all the required statements and declarations and uploaded any additional supplementary files (including reporting guidelines where relevant).

7.4 ORCID

As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review process SAGE is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized.

The collection of ORCID IDs from corresponding authors is now part of the submission process of this journal. If you already have an ORCID iD you will be asked to associate that to your submission during the online submission process. We also strongly encourage all co-authors to link their ORCID ID to their accounts in our online peer review platforms. It takes seconds to do: click the link when prompted, sign into your ORCID account and our systems are automatically updated. Your ORCID iD will become part of your accepted publication’s metadata, making your work attributable to you and only you. Your ORCID iD is published with your article so that fellow researchers reading your work can link to your ORCID profile and from there link to your other publications.

If you do not already have an ORCID ID please follow this link to create one or visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.

7.5 Information required for completing your submission

You will be asked to provide contact details and academic affiliations for all co-authors via the submission system and identify who is to be the corresponding author. These details must match what appears on your manuscript. The affiliation listed on the manuscript should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a manuscript note at the end of the paper. At this stage please ensure you have included all the required statements and declarations and uploaded any additional supplementary files (including reporting guidelines where relevant).

7.6 Permissions

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. For further information including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.

If your paper is accepted for publication after peer review, you will first be asked to complete the contributor’s publishing agreement. Once your manuscript files have been checked for SAGE Production, the corresponding author will be asked to pay the article processing charge (APC) via a payment link. Your article will be prepared for publication and can appear online within 5-6 weeks.

8.1 SAGE Production

Your SAGE Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will made available to the corresponding author via our editing portal SAGE Edit, or by email to the corresponding author and should be returned promptly. Authors are reminded to check their proofs carefully to confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence and contact details are correct, and that Funding and Conflict of Interest statements, if any, are accurate. Please note that if there are any changes to the author list at this stage all authors will be required to complete and sign a form authorizing the change.

8.2 Online publication

One of the many benefits of publishing your research in an open access journal is the speed to publication. With no page count constraints, your article will be published online in a fully citable form with a DOI number as soon as it has completed the production process. At this time it will be completely free to view and download for all.

8.3 Promoting your article

Publication is not the end of the process! You can help disseminate your paper and ensure it is as widely read and cited as possible. The SAGE Author Gateway has numerous resources to help you promote your work. Visit the Promote Your Article page on the Gateway for tips and advice.